Vascular Connections The Official Newspaper of the Vascular Annual Meeting
PREVIEW EDITION
SOCIETY FOR VASCULAR SURGERY • JUNE 20–JULY 2, 2020 • SVS ONLINE
Crawford Critical Issues Forum 2020 echoes founding charge: ‘Defining and valuing vascular surgery in the coming decade’ By Bryan Kay This year’s E. Stanley Crawford Critical Issues Forum is set to come full circle from its very genesis 32 years ago at the Vascular Annual Meeting (VAM) in Chicago.
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ow a lynchpin of the Society for Vascular Surgery (SVS) flagship event on its opening day, this year not only will it make an unlikely return to the original Saturday slot it occupied in 1988 but also to the spirit of the fundamental themes outlined by E. Stanley Crawford, MD, then the outgoing SVS president, when he called for the forum’s introduction. As per tradition, the session is the brainchild of the incoming SVS president. This year's rendering of the forum, entitled “Defining and valuing vascular surgery in the coming decade,” covers vascular surgery branding, the value of the specialty to the healthcare system, an SVS Wellness Task Force pulse check, and insight on how U.S. healthcare rankings are compiled by U.S. News & World Report. President-elect Ronald L. Dalman, MD, saw the founding charge set out by his forbear reverberating down the years. “The original impetus for the meeting was to affirm the leadership of the SVS in the development of vascular surgical science and help the society to navigate the challenges of the times, separate from the more scientific presentations: The question that was posed by E. Stanley Crawford
week in contrast to more recent times when the conference begins on a Wednesday: “So it being on a Saturday this year, we have come full circle on that.” That extends to the theme. Dalman considers the varying topics that have constituted the forum over the years. Some have been clinical, while more recently and commonly they have tended toward some of the more macro level challenges to vascular surgery practice. It’s at this juncture Dalman slots in, picking up the baton left first by Michel S. Makaroun, MD, SVS president from 2018–19, and Kim Hodgson, MD, the incumbent president. While the former focused on the perils of a coming shortage in vascular surgeons, Hodgson zeroed in on appropriateness in care. Which brings things neatly back to the baseline set by Crawford three decades ago. In June 1996, Calvin B. Ernst, MD, penned an article in the Journal of Vascular Surgery that recalled the opening years of the Crawford forum’s journey.
was, ‘Who would want to go into vascular surgery today with the uncertainties of tomorrow and how can those who are already committed remain dominant?’” the president-elect tells Vascular Connections. “That’s the founding charge.” VAM 2020, of course, has been replaced by the alternative virtual conference SVS ONLINE owing to the novel coronavirus. As Dalman notes, VAM traditionally was held at the beginning of the
By Bryan Kay Extracellular vesicles enhance deep vein thrombosis (DVT) via receptor interacting protein kinase-3 (RIPK3), the study that claimed this year’s SVS Foundation Resident Research Award found, raising the suggestion of a causal relationship between necroptosis and hypercoagulative states seen in various diseases.
“It’s ironic if you read this article, many of those same issues and questions were being addressed more than 30 years ago,” says Dalman. “They’ve evolved, they’ve expanded, they’ve taken on different levels of urgency. But the fundamental questions are still there. I think that’s how we came up with the program for this year’s Crawford Critical Issues Forum.” The first presentation on the Crawford slate sees an update on the
MITRI KHOURY, MD, a general surgery resident at the University of Texas Southwestern in Dallas, will present the findings during the William J. von Liebig Forum—the opening scientific session—on the first day of SVS ONLINE. Khoury and a team of colleagues had sought to establish how RIPK3 is carried in plasma and whether its presence can enhance thrombus formation. “Receptor interacting protein kinase 3 (RIPK3) is a key mediator of a regulated form of cell death termed necroptosis,” they state. “Recent studies have demonstrated elevated levels of RIPK3 within the plasma of patients with hypercoagulative states. In addition, other mediators of necroptosis have been found to be associated with thrombus formation.” The fruit of several different projects
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GENESIS
President-elect Ronald Dalman
Resident Research Award-winning paper: Extracellular vesicles enhance DVT via RIPK3